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With its newest Win-dows-based LapLink 2000, LapLink.com (formerly Traveling Software) has taken on the Internet as a file-transfer and remote-control medium. The new version of LapLink is a worthy evolutionary successor to LapLink Professional, which came out in 1998.
The Link In LapLink
One might think of the LapLink software as comprising two separate components: the infrastructure for connecting two LapLink-equipped PCs together, and then the applications that happen after the connection, that is, file transfer and remote control. Let's look at these components separately.
LapLink has the ability to connect via direct serial or parallel cables included in the box, or via direct dial-up using analog models. It also allows connections via USB cable, which is a $39.99 option. In our tests, we focused more on LapLink's more valuable ability to connect over an IP-based LAN or the Internet. By specifying an IP address, we swiftly connected machines on a 10-Mbps Ethernet LAN: a 350-MHz Compaq Presario 5610 running Windows 2000 Professional beta 2, and a dual 400-MHz Dell PowerEdge 2300 server running Windows NT 4. We also dialed our local ISP from our 120-MHz IBM ThinkPad 760EL, running Windows 98 Second Edition, using a 56K modem, and were easily able to establish a linkage between the ThinkPad and the Presario.
Connections via the Internet can be somewhat problematic when there are dynamic IP addresses involved, or when users move their notebooks from LAN to LAN. LapLink 2000 offers the capability to register a unique machine name with an Internet Locator Service (ILS) server, by default LapLink.com's own free ILS server. We tried that with the ThinkPad notebook, setting it to automatically register itself as "CamLab Notebook" with the LapLink's ILS whenever LapLink 2000 started up. Once done, it was easy to connect to it via that name from the Presario. We then broke the ThinkPad's dial-up connection, called into a different ISP, and, indeed, the Presario was still able to connect to the notebook, without any other changes required-though on two occasions LapLink didn't seem...